


Presentiment

by tastewithouttalent



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: First Meetings, Fist Fights, Inline with canon, Knives, M/M, No Plot/Plotless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-23 18:09:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18707257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tastewithouttalent/pseuds/tastewithouttalent
Summary: "There’s a young man sitting at the edge of the riser at the edge of the field, one knee drawn up in front of him while the other dangles over the edge, and even if he’s dropping his hands as Shizuo pivots to glare at him the absolute focus of his eyes remains fixed on Shizuo to remove any possibility for confusion." Shinra makes an introduction and Shizuo finds himself captivated.





	Presentiment

Shizuo is having a bad day.

To be perfectly fair, his life has drifted far from the peaceful existence he used to hope for. His dreams of that were shattered, he thinks, as part of the same motion that hefted his family’s refrigerator over his head and crushed the bones of his body beneath the too-much weight bearing down against him. Shizuo spent his recovery time reflecting on his absurd attempt, convincing himself it was an isolated incident, that next time would be different. Three days later he was back in the hospital with a shattered forearm and a dislocated shoulder from dragging too hard against the street sign that was the closest thing to hand when his temper snapped loose from his restraint once more, and since then he’s been in and out of the sterile white walls, alternately confined to the safety of a hospital bed and set free on a world as the ticking time bomb that his newfound strength has made him.

He spends less time in the hospital as the years pass. His body heals, repeating the effort of mending torn muscles and shattered bones until they stop breaking at all, until the temper that demands excessive force can seize control of Shizuo’s body and make use of it without destroying it in the process. There is some relief there to his parents, Shizuo thinks, in seeing their son free of the hospital that served as his second home for so much of his elementary school years; but it is damnation to Shizuo, to find himself saddled with the combination of temper and strength enough to prevent him from even finding what brief peace his hospitalizations granted him. For some time it’s enough to keep his anger at even more of a hair-trigger, just from irritation at the injustice that has become such a staple of his life; but even he can’t sustain fury for years, and with the passing of time comes resignation to his fate. Shizuo craves peace, desires the calm of a quiet day with a desperation he can hardly frame into words; and by the time he has graduated middle school, he has learned to claim successes as they come to him, in the span of hours or even sometimes days that pass in sedate contentment.

This is not one of those days. Shizuo lost his temper on the way to his first day of high school, crumpling a nearby lamppost into the shape of his fingers, and at lunch he shattered the bento he brought with him to splinters in the fist he formed without even realizing. By the time his first day of high school is over all he wants to do is walk the distance home through the falling sakura petals and savor the relief that comes with at least knowing this day is over.

That proves too much to hope for, though. He’s hardly stepped out of the front doors of the school when a shout beckons him to one of the play fields, where a dozen gang members stand in matching coats and vicious grins to provide vengeance for some slight one of Shizuo’s latest surges of temper did to one of their own. Shizuo doesn’t even take on the futile task of explaining the truth of the situation to them, or the vanishing likelihood that any of them will walk away satisfied with the result of this brawl; truth be told, there is some relief to surrendering to it, to shrugging his new school jacket off his shoulders and tossing it aside so he can step into the chaos of a fistfight against a crowd of attackers. Blows land at his chest, cheek, stomach, raining down upon him with the intensity of a storm and no more hurt than raindrops, and Shizuo takes the frustration that has been building in him the whole of the day, and the regret that weighs him down with the certainty of his own failures, and he spends it in simple, solid blows stripped of any kind of grace. He is no hero, is no artist, to make something beautiful of the violence that surges free of him in spite of all his attempts to restrain it; all he has to offer is raw strength, brutal and ugly and savage, and that he gives up in punch after punch after punch, until none of his attackers remain standing and all the sound that is left in the space is the rough pant of Shizuo’s breathing in his own ears.

The sound of applause is so unexpected Shizuo doesn’t realize for a moment what it is he’s hearing. It’s flat in the open air, and with no more than a single pair of hands to offer it, but it continues from the shadow of the building behind Shizuo without any indication of self-consciousness. Shizuo turns aside from the destruction of the attackers he has created in front of him, his mouth set into a frown that he doesn’t try to soften as he looks back to confront the source of that clapping so incongruous that he is hardly even sure it is intended for him.

It certainly is. There’s a young man sitting on the lip of the riser at the side of the field, one knee drawn up in front of him while the other dangles over the edge, and even if he’s dropping his hands as Shizuo pivots to glare at him the absolute focus of his eyes remains fixed on Shizuo to remove any possibility for confusion. Shizuo glimpsed him this morning, standing at a window and looking down at the school’s courtyard as Shizuo stepped through the gates and lifted his head to answer the demand of the gaze he felt fixed on him, but even at a distance Shizuo had felt himself struck, and the effect is only heightened by this greater proximity.

The stranger is beautiful. Shizuo doesn’t tend to spend much time worrying about his own physical appearance, and he lacks the attention to spare to consider others’; but the young man staring at him from the shadow of the school building is so striking that appreciation seems to be a matter of instinct more than choice. His hair is saturated black, the shine of it muted by shadow into impossible softness until it seems to form a frame for the brilliance of his eyes, so bright they look nearly crimson even in the dimmer lighting of his present position. His thin shirt clings to his body, hugging his chest and fitting tight around his waist where the short hem of his jacket makes him look even slimmer than his angled wrist and elegant fingers prove him to be, and his features are just as elegant, from the rise of his cheekbones under pale skin to the line of his nose. His jaw is set, his chin braced into a stability that might suggest judgment with another expression; but his lips are curved upward, shaped into a smile so sharp with suggestion that Shizuo’s heart rate picks up with just a glance. His posture is an invitation, his smile an offer, his gaze a dare; Shizuo’s body tightens in response, his exhausted limbs drawing taut again with adrenaline that urges him to close the distance, to draw closer to the open-flamed beauty the other is bearing with easy artistry.

Shizuo doesn’t even see Shinra for the first moment, doesn’t recognize the familiar face standing alongside the breathtaking beauty of the stranger until the other’s voice rings loud over the field that Shizuo has turned to such a scene of destruction. “That’s Orihara Izaya. He went to our middle school.” He goes on talking but Shizuo can’t hold his attention to the meaning of the words. He’s too caught by the force of those scarlet eyes fixed on him, too tangled up in the suggestion trapped at the curve of the other’s lips. Izaya looks like a model, arranged into deliberate elegance by the urging of some unseen photographer, polished and perfected for the appreciation of his audience; but there is no one looking at him but Shizuo, no one to admire the line of his leg or the drape of his fingers but the stranger scowling at him from across the pavement between them. Shizuo feels every detail of his own appearance laid bare by the calculation of Izaya’s stare -- the sweat sticking his hair to his forehead, the wrinkles rumpling the hem of his shirt, the bruises and dust and blood staining his knuckles and ground deep into his skin. Izaya gazes at him, meeting Shizuo’s attention beat-for-beat, breath-for-breath, as if as enraptured by Shizuo’s disheveled presence as Shizuo is disarmed by his own; and then Izaya shuts his eyes, and tips his head to the side, and Shizuo feels the rejection of that casual motion like a slap across his face.

“That’s awful, Shinra.” His tone is entirely at odds with his words, a better match for the smile still clinging to his lips than the angle of his brows drawing together into a show of hurt suited for the performer his looks suggest him to be. Shizuo can taste the sweet of it on the back of his tongue, syrup turned to poison by the ragged rasp of his own breathing and the proof of his reckless temper left to display his identity as surely as Izaya’s elegant pose displays his own. Shinra is speaking again, laughing over a reply directed at Izaya’s angled head instead of to Shizuo watching them, but Shizuo doesn’t wait for a pause in the conversation before he speaks loudly enough to demand the attention of everyone before him.

“You piss me off.” It’s not the full truth, or at least not the explanation for it; Shizuo can feel his chest aching with the raw pain of too-much appreciation, of the desperation of want that comes with a desire far in excess of anything meant to be borne. In another setting, perhaps, he could turn aside, could gaze and appreciate and let it go with more mature grace; but in this moment, with his knuckles still aching with the afterimage of blows and his body slick with sweat from the exertion that so rules his life, all he can feel is bitterness, his self-loathing spreading contagiously to infect even his objective appreciation of the beauty right in front of him. It doesn’t seem fair that someone should be so graceful, that someone else can bear himself with such fluid elegance it dries Shizuo’s mouth and flushes his skin, and least of all that he should do so within the shape of Shizuo’s ordinary life, near enough that Shizuo could reach out and touch that delicate wrist, that vivid hair, were he not so sure of mottling porcelain skin to sickly bruises at the first flicker of temper lancing through him.

“Oh?” Izaya opens one eye to fix Shizuo with the weight of his attention again. His gaze seems to glow the brighter with the smokey dark of his lashes before it, as much as his voice dips into a heat that spills down Shizuo’s spine even as his shoulders tighten with some instinctive alarm. “Too bad. I thought you and I could have some fun.”

Izaya’s voice is dripping with innuendo, the suggestion on his tone so clear Shizuo feels as if the other has lifted the slack weight of his arm from the support of his knee and reached out to stroke delicate fingers against the sweat-sticky line of Shizuo’s jaw. The mockery is clear without being stated, implicit in the distance between them, in the gap between Izaya’s languid position and Shizuo’s solid stance; as if there is any possibility of connection between them, as if Shizuo could possibly reach out to so much as press his fingers to the picture-perfection of Izaya’s presence. Shizuo bares his teeth against the hurt of it, turning away to at least impose what barrier his shoulders may offer between himself and the reality of Izaya’s presence. “Shut up.”

“Don’t be like that.” Izaya’s voice is silky, the words sliding free of his lips so smoothly Shizuo can picture the smirk clinging to them, can feel the dark of Izaya’s gaze like heat against the back of his neck. “Shizuo-kun.”

It’s the honorific that does it, the sound of that voice and the image of those lips forming to such intimate teasing against the familiar shape of Shizuo’s name. Shizuo’s jaw tenses, his fingers curl, and when he turns it’s with his arm upraised, with his whole body coming forward to drive the strain of adrenaline in him into the comfortable shape of anger, of violence instead of the irreconcilable desire it might otherwise be. Shizuo will smash his fist into Izaya’s perfect cheekbone, will destroy the artistry of that graceful recline with the brute force that is all he has to offer in response; there’s a relief to the thought, to the simplicity of the action even as his heart aches a familiar hurt for those things he can’t have, the peace and comfort and beauty that are as far beyond his reach as gentleness is to his too-strong hands. At least he can reply, can answer with action what he can’t with words; but as his body lunges forward Izaya moves too, his relaxed posture snapping into action faster than Shizuo can believe. Shizuo’s fist swings towards Izaya’s face, arcing to slam the breath free of the other’s chest; but his punch meets unresisting air, swinging wide before slamming into the metal that Izaya had been perched on. Izaya is gone, vanished as rapidly as if by magic, and Shizuo is left staring into the twisted metal destroyed by his blow.

It’s the flicker of shadow at the corner of his eye that tells him to turn, moving with a speed too much for Shizuo to ever manage by intention; the pivot he makes is instinctive, his movement made whip-quick by the flex of every overstrong muscle in his body. He twists to face that brilliant smile, those dark eyes, and Izaya is close, immediately, lurching forward into Shizuo’s space until Shizuo thinks for a moment he’s about to press their lips together. Shizuo is caught off-guard, his footing unsteady and his body torn between instinctive retreat and sudden anticipation, and then something bright slices the air between them and Shizuo’s chest blossoms into a wave of hot-flushing pain. Shizuo falls back, his footing skidding as he stumbles away and clutches at the cut burning the promise of blood through him, and Izaya dances backwards into the light of the setting sun, flourishing the knife Shizuo didn’t see him draw into a sleek line of illumination.

“See?” Izaya tips his chin down, his lashes cast his eyes to shadow. The dark of his hair catches the light into shades of purple and blue, iridescent to set off the red-stained dark of his gaze. Even with the open blade held into a clear threat between them, Shizuo can’t look aside from Izaya’s eyes as the other flutters his lashes and dips his voice to slick seduction. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

Shizuo stands still for a moment, his fingers clutched tight around the torn front of his shirt as blood seeps to stain the fabric as red as Izaya’s eyes. His heart is pounding; he can feel the rhythm of it beating against the fist he has clenched at his shirt. Behind him Shinra hums a note of approval, or maybe of amusement, but Shizuo can’t look away from Izaya. Izaya cants his head to the side, and flashes his teeth into a smile that glitters sharp as the blade he’s holding; and then he turns, and Shizuo’s body lunges into pursuit before his mind has realized Izaya is even running. Izaya glances back over his shoulder, his lashes dipping to invitation as his smile breaks wider; but Shizuo didn’t need the encouragement to tip his shoulders forward and fall into all-out pursuit as Izaya turns to dart away with that same startling speed.

His shirt is torn, his chest is bleeding, his breath is rasping; but the thunder of his heart is for more than just anger, and when Shizuo reaches for the dark jacket in front of him it’s with his hand open with desire instead of closed on a fist.


End file.
